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Comment by draebek | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on your launch! But I confess that I am really confused. This sounds exactly like Aider, but closed source and it's locked into a single LLM API? I just watched you use it, and looks a lot like Aider too? Why would I use this over Aider?

I've seen people say "you don't have to add files to Codebuff", but Aider tells me when the LLM has requested to see files. I just have to approve it. If that bothers you, it's open source, so you could probably just add a config to always add files when requested.

Aider can also run commands for you.

What am I missing?

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I don't think you're missing anything.

Aider tends to maintain near "state of the art" including e.g. treesitter, and an actually refined (as in, iterated improvements over time) user experience.

Aider has been refining for 8000 commits since May of 2023. Codebuff "all started" circa Claude Sonnet 3.5.

The story of discovery (e.g. git patch) at best feels like a lack of researching the landscape since leaderboards for SOTA indicate whether a model performs better as whole code or diffs and Anthropic even cites Aider benchmarks, but cynically, the narrative feels a bit like looking through the things Aider has been doing differently/better, and putting them in an origin story so the feature list might sound less like the “sincerest form of flattery.”

Particularly concerning is the story talking about "seeing" users coding loops. Perhaps this is a figure of speech. As designed, Codebuff are in the middle of all users' code slinging, so perhaps it isn't.

Checking the Privacy Policy shows it's only about cookies and tracking, not about information privacy or IP protection of any kind.

Checking the Terms of Service says they own any code you post through it and can give it to others:

"However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service."

Meaning, the TOS is a for a public social media type service, not for an intellectual property service.

(Note that in VSCode "cline" can give Aider a run for its money.)

Thanks for your reply! I started Codebuff without being aware of Aider. I actually have not yet tried Aider (though I plan to try it soon!).

It's totally true that a lot of the development of Codebuff is merely me (and Brandon) working through a lot of the problems that Aider already solved! That makes sense.

Partly, my thesis is that if you start after Sonnet 3.5 is out, that you design things differently. For example, I started without manual file selection and worked to make it more like an agent that has native access to your environment.

Needless to say, I'm a fan of the work Paul has done on Aider, and I've appreciated the benchmarks and guides he's created and shared publicly. And Cline is also an amazing project which I want to try out soon as well!

With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase, and mainly store logs that we use to debug the application. When seeing users use Codebuff, I mean I literally watched them use it, as we've done many in-person user tests, plus the Manifold Team has been using Codebuff for a while.

We also intend to release a Privacy Mode, like Cursor has, where we will not store anything at all, not even the logs of your interactions!

It makes sense to be a bit skeptical of Codebuff, since we are so new, but I intend to not let our users down!

Interesting!

Being in the same product space for more than 3 months, I wonder how one can not come across 2 popular open source tools that do more or less the same thing.

Like Aider has 21k stars, and Cline has around 11k stars. Both these product names come up on HN, Reddit frequently.

Curious to know if YC does some research on existing products before backing a new business.

This was surprising to me too.

I've also built a similar free and open-source tool gptme (2.5k stars), since the start of last year (GPT-3.5). It has been impossible to ignore the great work done by Aider.

Yup. I recall that at some point maybe a year ago, pretty much every other LLM thread that had people speculating whether some LLM could do X or Y / improved or worsened for Z / etc., would have Paul show up and comment something along the lines, "Actually, I've benchmarked this thoroughly in my work on Aider; here's <link to data and analysis>" or such. Those were usually some of the most insightful comments in the whole thread.

I found those comments, and the work they linked to, especially valuable because it's rare to see advanced work on LLM applications done and talked about in the open. Everyone else doing equivalent work seems to want to make a startup out of it, so all we usually get is weekend hacks that stall out quickly.

It seems like we're all in our own tech bubbles more and more. Distribution is clearly a tough problem to crack, and no one in this space has really mastered it yet, aside from arguably Github Copilot.

No comment on YC here, but I think it's easy to criticize from the outside. I've personally have been impressed by all the peers, group partners, and alumni I've met so far. I'm biased, but I think YC knows what it's doing. Also, YC backs founders, not ideas.

In any YC application, they request a list of competitors and why your product is better! Curious about what OP listed as competitors in the application.

Maybe the person reading the application was not aware of the competition either.

Here's my application: https://manicode.notion.site/Manicode-YC-application-c52f592...

I listed: Cursor, Devin, Codium, Augment, Greptile, Lovable.dev, Aider.chat, mentat.ai, devlo.ai, etc

So I did mention Aider. I was definitely aware that it existed, I just hadn't used it.

> With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase [...]

It isn't necessarily a strong guarantee to have "pledged", although it is appreciated.

Amber Heard ruined that word for me.

It sounds minor that it finds files for you, but if you try it out, you'll see that it's a giant leap in UX and the extra files help it generate better code because it has more examples from your codebase.

But you said you haven't tried Aider, how can you say it's a "leap in UX"?

My own tool `gptme` lets the agent interactively read/collect context too (as does Anthropic in their latest minimal-harness submission to SWE-bench), it's nothing novel.

I'm just saying what users of Codebuff have said about us compared to competitors.

You should try Codebuff and see for yourself how it reads files! It's not simply a tool call. We put a lot of work into it.

I did find codebuff a lot easier to install and get started with...usability can make or break a project. Just as a user, I think it's nice to have multiple projects doing the same thing -- exploring more of the solution space.

(I've just played a little bit with aider and codebuff. I've previously tried aider and it always errored out on my code base, but inspired by this comment I tried again, and now it works well.)

Beyond what James highlighted, I personally really like how simple Codebuff is. CLI tools tend to go a bit overboard with options and configurations imo, which is ok if you're just setting them up once or twice. But for a tool I want to rely upon every day for my work, I want them to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Have you used Aider extensively? How are you finding it for your coding needs vs IDE-based chats?

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